Author Archives: Dana Pico

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#Climapocracy! Pete Buttigieg wants us all to reduce our carbon emissions, but he takes a jet every 3½ days

I’m pretty sure that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg would want to reconsider his tweet, but, not to worry, I’ve got the screen capture!

The math is simple: December 14th, when he tweeted his original, is the 348th day of the year, and the Secretary told us that this was his 99th flight of the year. 348 ÷ 99 = 3.5151 repeating, 3.52 a close enough approximation. Every 3½ days the Secretary of Transportation has been flying off to somewhere!

From The Washington Post:

“Inevitably, every transportation decision is a climate decision, whether we acknowledge it or not,” Buttigieg said in an interview with The Climate 202. “So I think that’s absolutely part of our mandate and part of our set of responsibilities as a department.”

It would seem that, in Mr Buttigieg’s 99 decisions to go leaving on a jet plane, he has taken 99 decisions to spew more CO2 into the atmosphere! Were all of those 99 trips necessary? Has he never asked himself, “Could I do this by videoconference?”

Mr Buttigieg said, at the COP26 conference:

Well, thank you very much and thanks to the U.K. for hosting us. Let me also note, with this audience, how much pleasure I take in the knowledge that the aircraft that brought me to the U.K. returned back to the States full of international travelers, and we’re delighted at that news.

We’re honored to be here with our fellow founding members of the International Aviation Climate Coalition demonstrating that we hear the voices of our citizens, especially our courageous young citizens, who are demanding similar courage on our part, knowing that their lives will be defined by our decisions. And that means not only hearing them but acting, especially on the hard things. And aviation is a sector that is famously considered hard to abate which I think in a less urgent moment, as with maritime, might have meant that it would be on down the list of priorities. But at a moment like this, it also equates to have to abate – and that’s what we’re doing.

Aviation is so central to the fabric of our global economy and our global community. And of course, it’s how so many of us got here this week. And I can tell you as a former mayor of a mid-sized Midwestern city in the U.S., it’s not only important for our global metro centers, but for communities in every part of every country.

And as we know it’s a significant contributor to climate change and without dramatic, urgent action, there will be substantial additional growth in emissions over the next 30 years.

So, it falls to us to find ways to limit those emissions urgently. And the question has become: will we act quickly enough to protect our countries and to seize the economic potential that sustainable aviation represents?

The reality is that the timelines are not being dictated by conferences or by congresses; they’re being set by the laws of physics. And the other timeline that is so important is the engineering that it takes to design, test, produce, and deploy lower carbon aircraft.

But we can control our response, and with that we can shape our collective future.

Yeah, I get it: Mr Buttigieg is a very high-ranking American government official, and there will be some required travel, travel to places he can’t get on his bicycle or an Elon Musk produced Tesla.

But 99 plane rides in less than a year?

Perhaps, just perhaps, we plebeians might take the Patricians more seriously when they tell us we must reduce our CO2 emissions if they showed us, by deeds, that they take their own words seriously.

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Bidenflation How many of those 81,283,501 people who voted for Joe Biden would have done so if they'd known they'd be five percent poorer in two years?

You may have heard the supposedly good news: the year-over-year inflation rate declined to 7.1%:

Consumer prices rose last month at the slowest 12-month pace since December 2021, closing out a year in which inflation hit the highest level in four decades and challenged the Federal Reserve’s ability to keep the U.S. economy on track.

The Labor Department on Tuesday said that its consumer-price index, a measurement of what consumers pay for goods and services, climbed 7.1% in November from a year ago, down sharply from 7.7% in October. The pace built on a trend of moderating price increases since June’s 9.1% peak, but it remained well above the 2.1% average rate in the three years before the pandemic.

There’s a lot more in The Wall Street Journal’s original.

Of course, the inflation rate only makes sense when compared to earnings. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table B-3, average private sector hourly earnings increased from $31.23 in November of 2021 to $32.64, a 5.09% increase, while average weekly earnings moved from $1,086.80 to $1,129.01, which was only a 3.88% increase. Compared to hourly wages, the average American worker is 2.01% poorer, in real terms, than he was in November of 2021; compared to average weekly earnings, he’s 3.22% poorer.

That isn’t the whole story. From November of 2020 to November of 2021, Table B-3 Historical Tables, average wages increased from $29.95 to $31.23, a 4.27% increase, while average weekly earnings went from $1,031.82 to $1,086.80, a 5.33% rise. Remember: this was moving from a COVID-19 restricted economy to one where almost all of the restrictions had been removed. But the November 2021 year-over-year inflation rate was 6.8%.

So, not only was the average American worker 3.22% poorer in November of 2022 than he was a year earlier, that’s on top of being 1.47% poorer, in real terms, the previous year. Due to the compounding effect of the math, average consumer prices were 14.38% higher in November of 2022 than in November of 2020,[1]1.068 x 1.071 = 1.1438 while average weekly earnings were 9.42% higher. That’s a loss of real earning power of 4.96%.

I wonder how many of those 81,283,501 people who voted for Joe Biden in November of 2020 would have done so if they’d known they’d be five percent poorer in two years.

And it’s going to get worse:

The figures leave the Fed on track to lift interest rates by 0.5 percentage point on Wednesday, following larger increases of 0.75 point at their past four meetings.

So, while economists anticipate home prices to start to fall, as demand is lowered due to higher interest rates, that does not mean that rent prices will fall. If the demand for buying homes declines, the demand for rental property necessarily increases, and that means higher rents. Rent increases for existing tenants normally occur just once a year, but rental increases for people moving during the year can and do occur at any time.

In 1849, Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle called economics the dismal science, and in a lot of ways, he was right. Economic reduces things to numbers, and a lot of people don’t like that, but it doesn’t mean that the numbers aren’t true.

The numbers I gave were averages, and I’m sure that many of the 81,283,501 Biden voters have managed to weather the inflation of the past two years reasonably well. But for every Biden voter who hasn’t had a problem with inflation, there’s another who has had Bidenflation eat up more of his earnings than the average. For every Biden voter who hasn’t seen any appreciable loss of economic well-being, there’s another who is worse off than the already-depressing averages.

References

References
↑1 1.068 x 1.071 = 1.1438
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Killadelphia What, did somebody recover from being dead?

We have already noted that there are questions concerning the homicide numbers in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page reported that there had been 488 murders as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11th.

At 9:21 AM EST on Monday, December 12th, Stevee Keeley of Fox 29 News tweeted:

Identity & age of Philadelphia’s 489th homicide victim in 2022 still not known yet to @phillypolice A 16 year old was shot twice in same shooting incident in Northeast Philadelphia 3:46am @FOX29philly.

Mr Keeley’s tweet included an image of the police press release.

So, a male of unknown age was pronounced dead at the scene, and another person was shot there, yet no weapon was recovered, nor was anyone arrested. Obviously a firearm was used, and just as obviously, someone fled the scene.

So, when I checked the Current Crime Statistics page this morning, I expected to see at least 489 homicides. Maybe I’m not the greatest mathematician around, but 488 + 1 = 489, right?

Well, apparently not, because the Philadelphia Police Department are now reporting that there were 488 homicides through 11:59 PM EST on Monday, December 12th. What, did somebody recover from being dead?

Is it any wonder that some people have no confidence at all in the city’s statistics?

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw is on her way out. A political appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia), following stints in Oakland, California, and as Chief of Police in Portland, Oregon, and supposedly once considered to have become Police Commissioner of New York City, when Mr Kenney’s term is over at the end of next year, Miss Outlaw is almost certainly out as well. With 499 murders in the city in 2020, her first year — and remember: 502 was the number first reported, and then scaled back — followed by 562 in 2021, and almost certainly between 509 and 516, good for second place all-time this year, it’s difficult to see any of Philly’s mayoral candidates wanting to keep her around. Former Councilwoman Helen Gym Flaherty, the furthest left, and therefore most probable winner of the Democratic primary, is an ally of District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Mr Krasner and Miss Outlaw do not exactly get along. Even if another Democrat wins the primary — and no Republican has ever won a direct mayoral election in Philadelphia — they are all looking at how Let ’em Loose Larry has won by a landslide in his election.

In other words, Miss Outlaw’s got to go.

This is the time, with only a year left in office, for the Commissioner to do something really radical and tell the truth. If she’s going to have to leave anyway, she could at least do so honestly.

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Killadelphia Is The Philadelphia Inquirer trying to keep the truth hushed up to protect Democrats?

I noted, just five days ago, that I saw a mathematical possibility, at the margin of error, that the City of Brotherly Love could finish very slightly below 500 homicides in 2022. That was based upon the decrease in the rate of killings since Hallowe’en.

Alas! while the rate of killings still isn’t in the 2021 range, it has picked up once again, and the math makes it seem impossible now. With 488 killings as of 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, December 11, 2022, Philly is now seeing 1.4145 murders per day; that works out to 516.29 murders for the year. And with at least six homicides over the last three days, the city has seen 43 murders in the 41 days since Hallowe’en. At that rate, 1.0488 per day, times thee 20 days left in the year, yields 20.98 homicides in these last three weeks. If there are 21 homicides in the last 20 days, that would end the year with 509 murders.

But that is working with the official homicide numbers, and Broad + Liberty, along with other outlets, broke the story of the uncounted deaths in the city, showing at least 101 “suspicious” deaths, in a photo taken just before Thanksgiving. That the credentialed media didn’t want to report that is evidenced by the fact that, since the story broke, The Philadelphia Inquirer, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, and the supposed newspaper of record for the area, and one which believes it is so important that the federal government should subsidize it, has nothing on that story, even though it was published four days ago, on a subject that would seem pretty serious and significant. Checking the Inquirer’s website main page, specific crime page, and doing a site search for suspicious deaths, as of 9:45 AM EST today showed no stories on the subject at all. Did the Inky investigate at all? Did Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw tell them that it was nothing, don’t worry about it? Did the top officers clam up?

You’d think that a leak like this, from someone inside the Philadelphia Police Department, would have piqued the interest of real journalists, especially the police-hating #woke of the Inquirer, but if you actually thought that, you’d be wrong, wrong, wrong!

Who knows, perhaps the unauthorized leak from someone in the Police Department was a fake, a political attack. If so, wouldn’t the journolists[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading want to expose that? After all, it’s a serious accusation, one which attacks the political leadership of the Police Department and the city as a whole . . . and Philadelphia hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President.

Oh, wait, that’s it: the editors of the Inky don’t want anything which could hurt the Democrats made public.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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Have we learned nothing?

At what point do we ask: why are we doing this?

Perhaps you haven’t heard of this, because it only rarely makes the credentialed media, but The Wall Street Journal finally covered it.

U.S. Builds New Firewall to Stop Spread of Militant Islamists

Hundreds of American troops join Western allies in Niger to block al Qaeda and Islamic State from advancing violence and influence in West Africa

by Michael M Phillips | Sunday, December 11, 2022 | 10:15 AM EST

OUALLAM, Niger—The front lines in the war between the West and militant Islamists have shifted to Africa, from Somalia on the continent’s eastern tip to the West African Sahel, a semidesert strip south of the Sahara.

In the Sahel, the U.S. and its allies are betting that Niger, the worst-off country in the world by a U.N. measure, offers the best hope of stopping the seemingly inexorable spread of al Qaeda and Islamic State.

Here’s where the Journal’s paywall begins. I’d say that I subscribe so that you don’t have to, but really, it’s the best newspaper in the world, and you should subscribe!

In the heart of the region, the nations of Mali and Burkina Faso are losing ground, roiled by militant attacks and military coups. In contrast, the elected civilian government in neighboring Niger is making slow headway against insurgents with the help of Western forces, U.S. and Nigerien officials said. Mali’s ruling junta has hired Kremlin-linked mercenaries to provide security, while Niger has shunned Russian intervention and welcomed U.S. and French forces.

“We’ve invested a lot with the Nigeriens, and we’re seeing a payoff from that,” said Lt. Col. Chris Couch, commander of U.S. special-operations troops in West Africa. Niger, he said, is emerging as a cornerstone of regional security.

The next few paragraphs describe how Nigerien — as opposed to Nigerian, which would mean troops from Nigeria, not from Niger — troops have been trained by United States Army Special Forces troops, are deployed from French aircraft, but our troops monitor from a “safe distance”.

U.S. commandos accompanied Nigerien forces on combat missions until a 2017 Islamic State ambush killed four American soldiers from the Special Forces outpost in Ouallam. The Green Berets now supervise from a safe distance, while local commandos they train carry out the raids.

I will admit it: it was after reading the previous paragraph that I decided to write about this. Am I the only one who has a difficult time believing that our most highly trained soldiers would actually stand by, monitoring, but not getting involved in the fighting?

Niger is proving a test ground for the U.S. strategy of deploying relatively small numbers of American troops—there are around 800 now in the country—to train local forces.

Historically, the strategy has yielded uneven results. U.S.-trained militaries in Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea overthrew civilian governments. After U.S. troops left Afghanistan in 2020, local forces collapsed under Taliban offensives, despite U.S.-supplied weapons and two decades of training.

“Uneven results,” huh?

Who knows, perhaps the US wanted those civilian governments overthrown. It’s not like we wouldn’t have ever supported military coup d’etat’s before.

But at some point, it has to be asked why we are doing this. Rule by Islamic State is a pretty horrible thing, but is it really any of our business if the Muslim fundamentalists rule in resource-starved Niger?

The Nigeriens will wind up like every other client state we’ve supported: doing things their own way, in accordance with their own culture. They won’t be somehow transformed into Americans or Westerners; they will develop their own society and culture based on how they think, not how we think.

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Why would anyone want to become a cop these days?

Following the unfortunate death of methamphetamine-and-fentanyl crazed drug addict and previously convicted felon George Floyd while he was resisting a legitimate arrest in Minneapolis, the left went wild, and “Defund the Police“, as though the problem wasn’t crime, but people being arrested for committing crimes. This stupid notion was popular with the street agitators, and thus some Democratic politicians took up the call, but it wound up fading from sight reasonably quickly, as sensible people — meaning, in this case: those not out in antifa demonstrations — soundly defeated a police reorganization proposal in Minneapolis.

But, of course, attacks on the legitimacy of the police continue, from shakedown lawsuits in Detroit to the George Soros-sponsored, cop-hating defense lawyer serving as Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner trying to put police officers doing their duty in jail, Philadelphia didn’t actually defund the police, per se, but the effect of the city’s policies has been to do just that: as we have previously noted, the Philadelphia Police Department is nearly 600 officers understrength from its authorized full strength of 6,380, with around 800 more expected to retire within the next four years. Police Academy classes have not kept up with officer attrition. And really, who’d want to become a Philly cop when the Police Commissioner won’t support you and the DA is trying to throw you in jail?

Well, it’s not just Philly! From The New York Times:

N.Y.P.D. Officers Leave in Droves for Better Pay in Smaller Towns

This year has seen the highest number of resignations in two decades.

By Chelsia Rose Marcius | Friday, December 9, 2022

Earlier this year, the chief of police in Aurora, Colo., needed to find a few dozen officers to join his force.

The chief, Dan Oates, was 50 officers short to patrol Aurora, a city of roughly 400,000 people just east of Denver. But he knew limiting his search to Colorado would not be enough: Like many other leaders in law enforcement, he has found that fewer people these days want to be cops.

So Chief Oates and his team began to seek recruits at agencies where they believed pay and morale were low. They settled on New York City, and in August, he flew about 1,800 miles to meet with New York Police Department officers. He convinced 14 of them to move out west.

“I feel bad raiding my home agency,” said Chief Oates, who once served as a deputy chief in New York City. “But frankly it’s a cutthroat environment right now among police chiefs to recruit talent, and we all desperately need it.”

The departure of those officers was no anomaly. The New York Police Department, with about 34,000 officers, has seen more resignations this year than at any time in the past two decades as other agencies have become more aggressive in recruiting from its ranks.

Through November, about 1,225 officers resigned before even reaching five years of service, according to New York City Police Pension Fund statistics obtained by The New York Times. Many left for other New York State agencies or police departments outside the state.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the numbers are pretty stark.

Chief Oates, who retired this week, said the officers he recruited from New York were partially lured by better pay. The starting salary at the Aurora Police Department is about $65,000 in an area where the average monthly rent is approximately $1,750 and the average home sale price is about $624,000, according to an August report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Incoming officers with four or more years on the job can earn a salary of around $100,000. Aurora also gives incentives to those who transfer from other departments, including a signing bonus of up to $10,000 and a $5,000 relocation bonus.

That is more money than officers make in New York City, where the median sales price for a home is $810,000 and the average monthly rent is about $4,500. The starting salary at the Police Department is $42,500, according to the most recent contract between the agency and the officer’s union. After three and a half years of service, officers can earn a salary of $47,000, and $85,292 after five and a half.

Even foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia pays its police officers more: $59,795 annual salary while a Recruit in the Academy, with a raise to $63,945 upon graduation and joining the PPD. Philly is a lot less expensive a city in which to live than New York: housing costs less, taxes are lower, and they can get Wawa coffee to drink as well!

But if the pay is higher, it also means putting up with open air drug markets in Kensington and having to patrol the Philadelphia Badlands.

As we noted on Thursday, when Philly had an official — whatever “official” means in Philadelphia — 499 homicides in 2020, neighboring Upper Darby Township had 10. With a population of 85,681 according to the 2020 census, that means that Upper Darby had a homicide rate of 11.67 per 100,000 population, while Philly’s that same year was 31.11 . . . and that paled before the 2021 homicide rate. Even directly adjacent to Philadelphia, smaller towns are safer.

Aurora, Colorado, which poached officers from the NYPD? With a population of 386,261 according to the 2020 census, the city saw 38 homicides that year, for as homicide rate of 9.84 per 100,000. Why wouldn’t a former NYPD cop, or Philadelphia Police officer, prefer to work there, where the pay is better and the crime rate a lot lower?

Yes, police pay is unacceptably low in New York City, and the left-leaning city council isn’t going raise it that much. But the real problem is that the big cities in the east — and not a few in the west — just plain hate cops! Why would anyone want to work in a place where the public spit on your shadow, if not your shoes?

The far left wanted to defund the police, and while they didn’t get it de jure, it has been achieved de facto: with major city police departments being hundreds of officers undermanned — Baltimore is 420 officers short staffed — what the left wanted has been achieved: fewer dedicated police officers to enforce the law.

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Let’s tell an obvious truth here: Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw will be out of a job in a year. An appointee of Mayor Jim Kenney, the mayor elected in 2023 to replace Mr Kenney, who is term-limited, will want someone, anyone! other than Miss Outlaw in that job. Even if the next mayor likes Miss Outlaw, and agrees with every single thing the Commissioner has done, no one is going to want to be saddled her record. At this point, the Commissioner needs to just woman up, and reveal the whole truth:

Questions about the accuracy of Philadelphia’s homicide statistics

Philadelphia reports an eight-percent year-to-date decline in homicides, but police sources again raise concern over how some deaths are classified in the city’s federally required crime reporting statistics.

by Ben Mannes | Thursday, December 8, 2022

At the time of the writing of this article, the Philadelphia Police Department reports a year-to-date homicide total of 482, a decline of 41 murders from this date last year. Normally, a eight percent decline in murders would be great news in a city that desperately needs some. However, ranking police sources have sent Broad + Liberty a photo from inside Police Headquarters concerning “Other” or “O Job” classification — leading many to question whether the eight percent decline was valid.

You can click on the photo to enlarge it, but to simplify it for you, I’ll tell you: the photo is (allegedly) of a whiteboard in Police headquarters, supposedly the homicide unit, indicating that, at the point the photo was taken, there had been 465 murders, 101 ‘suspicious’ deaths, and 76 ‘other’ cases. In 2021, the numbers were the 562 homicides reported many times, plus 190 suspicious deaths. The ‘other’ is a new category, one which does not involve the finding of a dead body.

In contrast with the daily reporting and real-time tracking of reported crimes in television and social media, many are left to wonder if the questions of 2020, when the city ended the year with just one homicide short of their all-time record, was being repeated. Broad + Liberty reached out to the police department and talked with Capt. Jason Smith of the Homicide Unit to clarify these issues.

We have noted, several times, the change in the Philadelphia Police Department’s statistics, down from the 502 homicides initially reported for 2020, down to 499, one short of the then-all-time record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, under the ‘leadership’ of then-Mayor Wilson Goode, he of MOVE bombing fame. I made a totally rookie mistake, and failed to get a screen capture of that, but a Twitter fellow styling himself NDJinPhilly was apparently smarter than me that particular time, took the screen shot, and then tweeted it to me.

Capt. Smith confirmed that they are both things, but there are no deaths or “bodies” associated with O-jobs. He clarified that “M-jobs” are murder investigations while “S-jobs” are deaths that may not be classified murders. Smith estimated that of the 103 S-jobs so far this year, at least twenty may be deemed self-defense, and thus not result in a homicide charge. Numerous others, according to Smith, are awaiting toxicology and brain samples from the medical examiner to determine whether or not they are homicides, vs. overdoses or accidental deaths, which could take months to get back from them.

Smith said that “The Homicide unit would be conducting an audit of all S-jobs in the next week,” which should reconcile numbers by year-end. Smith said that his unit tries to conduct such an audit every two to three months, which could result in an increase in homicides by two to three cases as a result. More relevant to the questions presented by the 2020 year-end homicide total, says Smith, is the issue of “delayed death investigations”, in where a victim dies later from injuries first reported as an assault, or when S-jobs are later reported as murders due to delayed results from toxicologists and/or medical examiners.

That’s all well and good, but Mr Mannes did not follow up with the obvious question: if there were “S” cases at the end of 2020 and 2021, which hadn’t been resolved into homicides or not homicides when we were given the end-of-year homicide totals, why, when they were finally resolved — surely at least some of them have been — did the year-end homicide totals for 2020 and 2021 never change? Are we expected to believe that, out of 190 ‘suspicious’ deaths in 2021, not a single one was revised to be a homicide? The odds of such would seem vanishingly small!

Smith told Broad + Liberty that a detailed breakdown of S-job classifications would be available after the audit and would be available for further updates. However, popular podcast host and former judicial warrant squad Sergeant Mark Fusetti reports some of his sources showed “S-jobs” that are obvious homicides, but remain outside the homicide statistics for various reasons; “Last year had a guy shot in the head in a van, but because the weapon wasn’t found, they have it as an S job” said Fusetti. “Sometimes its a clear murder, but the Medical Examiner sends back questions so it gets an S Job” continues Fusetti. “It then sits on the desk while the Detective has to work newer cases, and it never gets reported on the homicide stats.”

Also see: The OK Corral: The PPD Has Been Lying To Its Officers

The city shouldn’t have to rely on a retired Police Sergeant, or on an anonymous officer who tweeted out that photo of the whiteboard, a photo that you can bet your last euro that the city did not want to see released. Right now, Philly needs a homicide detective to put this information together and leak it to media who will report on it.

Of course, it would be preferable that, rather than having it leaked, if Commissioner Outlaw would realize that her career in Philly has no more than 12½ months left to run, that her job performance in the City of Brotherly Love means that she’ll never get a top police job in any city with a six-figure number of residents, and just go ahead and tell the whole truth herself. The end is coming; she might as well be honest about things, and rat out Mayor Kenney if he ordered her to massage the numbers.

Going out still lying about things won’t help her reputation anywhere she searches for another job, because, now that this story has broken, people will keep hammering down and hammering down and hammering down on it; it will eventually become completely public.

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To the government, telling the whole truth will make you less likely to comply, so the whole truth will be hidden

When I saw this tweet from the New York Times Guild, asking me to not cross a “digital picket line” and read any material from The New York Times, I knew that I’d have to reference some story from the Grey Lady on my site today. And it actually turned out to be something good; someone who was doing something really radical like telling the truth about COVID-19:

Covid-19 Isn’t a Pandemic of the Unvaccinated Anymore

by David Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Americans received their first Covid-19 vaccine doses in December 2020, which means we are now approaching the beginning of the third year of the pandemic’s vaccine phase. And yet hundreds of Americans are still dying each day. Who are they? The data offers a straightforward answer: older adults.

Though it’s sometimes uncomfortable to say it, mortality risk has been dramatically skewed by age throughout the pandemic. The earliest reports of Covid deaths from China sketched a pattern quickly confirmed everywhere in the world: In an immunologically naïve population, the oldest were several thousand times more at risk of dying from infection than the youngest.

We reported, on November 24th, how The Washington Post used a similar headline, “Covid is no longer mainly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Here’s why.“, and even that was an editorial change from the original, “Vaccinated people now make up a majority of covid deaths”. It was that similarity which caught my eye on the Times website.

But the skew is actually more dramatic now — even amid mass vaccinations and reinfections — than it was at any previous point over the last three years. Since the beginning of the pandemic, people 65 and older accounted for 75 percent of all American Covid deaths. That dropped below 60 percent as recently as September 2021. But today Americans 65 and over account for 90 percent of new Covid deaths, an especially large share given that 94 percent of American seniors are vaccinated.

Yet these facts seem to contradict stories we’ve told about what drives vulnerability to Covid-19. In January, Joe Biden warned[1]Full disclosure: this reference hyperlink was not in the author’s original, but was added by me. that the illness and death threatened by the Omicron variant represented “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” But that month, in which nearly 85,000 Americans died, the unvaccinated accounted for 59 percent of those deaths, down from 77 percent the previous September, according to analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The share of deaths among older adults that January was nearly 74 percent.

There’s more at the original, but, Alas! it is available only to Times subscribers, so if you aren’t one, you’ll just have to take my word for it that what I’ve quoted is the real thing. Several paragraphs further down, after Mr Wallace-Wells goes through some statistics and caveats, we come to this:

That is a very good deal, of course. But it also means that, given the underlying age skew, a vaccinated person in their late 80s shares a similar risk of Covid death as a never-vaccinated 70-year-old. Which is to say, some real risk. If it was ever comfortable to say that the unconscionable levels of American deaths were a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” it is surely now accurate to describe the ongoing toll as a “pandemic of the old.”

So why aren’t we?

One answer is that as a country, we prefer just to not see those deaths at all, regarding a baseline of several hundred deaths a day as a sort of background noise or morbid but faded wallpaper. We don’t need to understand who is dying or why in part because we don’t want to reckon with the fact that around 300 Americans are now dying from Covid-19 every day, at a rough pace of about 100,000 per year, making it the country’s third leading cause of death. This is normalization at work, but it is also a familiar pattern: We don’t exactly track the ups and downs of cancer or heart disease either.

At 69½ years old, and having contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus myself, though not very ill at all and seemingly getting over it, I’m not particularly thrilled with it being a “pandemic of the old,” but let’s face it: the elderly are always at greater risks, from everything. Our immune systems are weaker, our reflexes slower. I’m perfectly able to admit that there are things I just can’t do as well as previously. But Mr Wallace-Wells continues to tell us why the government was shading the truth:

Another answer is that — partly to promote good behavior, partly to more easily blame others for our general predicament — the country spent a lot of time emphasizing what you could do to protect yourself, which left us without much of a vocabulary to describe what underlying vulnerability inevitably remained.

Translation: “to promote good behavior” means to try to push people to take a vaccine some were clearly reluctant to take by not telling the whole truth about it. The government were so worried that people might be less willing to take the decision to get vaccinated if they had the complete truth that they preferred to hide part of the truth.

And we’re still seeing that today. Think about the commercials for various prescription drugs that producers say you should “ask your doctor about” if you have a particular condition. They all have one thing in common: they all have a list of potential negative results or reactions that some patients have had.

But not the COVID vaccines! The government is pushing them, every day, through television commercials, but I have yet to see one in which the negative side effects, the documented negative side effects that some people have suffered, have been listed. The percentage of people who have suffered serious side effects is small, but it is not zero.

Then, of course, there was the truly Big Lie, a lie spread by many people:

  • Rachel Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control: “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick. And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.” Even some of her minions at the CDC pushed back against that.
  • Joe Biden: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die. “

We found out, of course, that the vaccines did not stop either contracting or transmitting the virus to others. Heck, I’m pretty much the poster boy for that one, in that my wife contracted it first, despite being fully vaccinated, twice ‘normally’ boosted, and having taken the additional, supposedly Omicron-specific booster, . . . and then I contracted it from her, despite being fully vaccinated and twice normally boosted.

By last January, this was known: acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, last January, that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” But the government have kept up the Big Lie, that if you get vaccinated and boosted, you wouldn’t get COVID.

What if the government had done something really radical and just told the truth? We can’t know whether developing a reputation for telling the truth would have led more or fewer people to choose to take the vaccines, though it surely seems probable that government efforts to force people to get vaccinated increased resistance. And maybe, just maybe, if the government had a reputation for telling the truth, people would trust them more on things other than COVID-19.

References

References
↑1 Full disclosure: this reference hyperlink was not in the author’s original, but was added by me.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer just trashed its own gun control arguments

We have previously noted the change from the 502 homicides originally reported for 2020, down to 499. Now, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Helen Ubiñas noted someone that many expected to be on the list of 499, but who wasn’t there. This one seems legitimate:

A 22-year-old was killed just over the city line in Upper Darby. That might have helped his family’s quest for answers.

A mere 100 yards might have made all the difference in an attempt to find a measure of justice.

by Helen Ubiñas | Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Amir Parks was a 22-year-old new father who was shot and killed near Cobbs Creek Park in August 2020. He was loved, friends and family told me. He was missed. He mattered.

But when it came to Parks’ death, answers were mostly hard to come by for those who knew him best. And there was this mystery: Why wasn’t Parks mentioned on the official list of Philadelphia’s 499 homicide victims in 2020?

Maybe the police had misidentified him or even misspelled his name, I thought, hardly an uncommon error in a city that averages more than a homicide a day.

After double and triple checking the list with the police, an answer. His loved ones were right; he had died around the woods along Cobbs Creek, in the 6500 block of North Church Lane not far from Marshall Road.

But that was about the length of a football field beyond the Philadelphia city line in Upper Darby Township, a section many misidentify as being part of Cobbs Creek.

What no one realized then was how crucial those 100 yards would be in his family’s quest for justice.

In 2020, when Philadelphia was just shy of 500 homicides, Upper Darby had 10.

As we have previously reported, the homicide rate, even adjusted for population, is several times higher in Philadelphia as in the rest of Pennsylvania. Those 499 homicides in 2020? They constituted 49.48% of all murders in the Keystone State, while the city has just 12.33% of the Commonwealth’s population.

It got worse last year, as the city’s 562 homicides were 54.72% of Pennsylvania’s total.

Of all the homicides in Philly in 2020, only 210 were solved, or about 42%‚ typical in a city where a majority of murders are unsolved.

By comparison, nine of the 10 homicides in Upper Darby that year have been solved, including last month when police arrested a 20-year-old man for killing Parks.

Now, I doubt that Mr Parks was included in the 502 number; the call was handled by the Upper Darby Police.

There followed several human interest story paragraphs concerning how nice a guy young Mr Parks was, and noting that, for the majority of homicides in Philadelphia itself, no one is arrested.

According to police, Parks was killed while illegally trying to sell guns to a potential buyer — a trade that (his cousin Shamiese) Parks–Gunagan said she believes her cousin took up in a desperate attempt to support his family.

And there it is: young Mr Parks was not the great guy in Miss Ubiñas story. Actually, it’s a bit of a surprise that the story was published at all, in that the Inquirer doesn’t usually tell us about the bad guys who get killed in the process of being bad guys.

I will admit to some doubts that a 22-year-old, in just “a desperate attempt to support his family,” would turn to gun-running. Such is not usually an entry-level crime. To be a gun-runner, you have to have money in advance, to buy the weapons you plan to sell at a profit. He could, I suppose, have just been a mule for the real gun-runner, but that would mean he’d have had to have known a pretty bad guy, and was trusted by that bad guy enough to make the sale.

Parks left a note on his phone shortly before he was killed: “Just in case something happens this is the person in the car.”

So, yeah, young Mr Parks knew that he was doing something bad, and that bad things could happen in the process. Miss Ubiñas’ first internal link was to Mr Park’s obituary in the Philadelphia Obituary Project, which tells us what a great and loving guy he was. But, if the Upper Darby Police are correct, he was still killed while he was committing a crime.

And it was more than just a simple, one-off crime. If Mr Parks was running guns, even as just somebody else’s mule, he was doing something which he had to know — and his obituary tells us that he was supposedly a smart guy — would enable other people to commit other crimes.

This is more than just a story about the killing of Mr Parks. It also points out the silliness of the arguments by Mayor Jim Kenney (D-Philadelphia) and District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), that the problem is that the state legislature in Harrisburg will not allow Philadelphia to pass its own, stricter gun control laws. Marshall Road in Upper Darby turns into Spruce Street in Philadelphia after you have crossed the bridge over Cobbs Creek as you pass the boundary between the two, but the Philadelphia Police are not sitting there, checking every border-crosser for contraband. If Philly had stricter gun control laws, the next thing about which the city, and the editors of the Inquirer, would whine is that those laws needed to be applied to Upper Darby and Haverford and Plymouth Meeting and Bensalem, because, as Mr Parks’ killing shows, the bad guys know how to drive to the next town.